“Prayer” was included in Nancy Cunard’s first published collection, Outlaws (Elkin Mathews, 1921). About Cunard’s poetry, John Lucas, a professor emeritus at Nottingham Trent University and the editor of Poems of Nancy Cunard: From the Bodleian Library (Trend Editions, 2005), writes in his introduction to the book, “In preparing this edition I decided against reprinting all of Nancy Cunard’s poems. Instead, I have chosen to follow her own wishes and publish the poems she wanted to see preserved. She was not an outstandingly good poet […] she lacked either the ability or, more likely, patience to eradicate those flaws [Ezra] Pound identified in her work. On the other hand, her imagination was undoubtedly stirred into life by political issues on which she hastened to take sides—and the side she took was invariably the just one. This had nothing to do with political correctness. It was born out of a grieved perception that much was rotten in the society of which she was a part, and her own privileged status gave her both an important vantage point to see just how rotten that was and the opportunity to make whatever amends she could.”